The inquest into British teenager Jay Slater’s death in Tenerife was adjourned a couple weeks ago after a pair of key witnesses (including Jay’s pal Lucy Mae) didn’t turn up to testify, but the whole thing has reignited interest in the case as new information continues to come to light.

One man who’s really invested in the Jay Slater saga is former Madeleine McCann investigator Mark Williams-Thomas, who is set to release a two-part podcast featuring new accounts of the night Jay Slater went missing, a month before his corpse was discovered in a ditch with severe head and pelvic injures, consistent with falling from a height.

In these podcast episodes, Williams-Thomas speaks with convicted drug dealer Ayub Qassim, who Jay accompanied back to an Airbnb on the night he went missing, and also Jay’s buddy, the aforementioned Lucy Mae Law.

Speaking to Williams-Thomas on the podcast, titled Jay Slater: The Investigation, Qassim reveals his final conversation with Jay, saying: “He (Jay) said to me pal I’m off, this woman told me I can get a bus every 10 minutes, I told him that he’s mad, there’s no bus that’s coming here every 10 minutes, chill out for a bit and I’ll drop you off later on.”

“He said, ‘No, no I’ve got to go to Los Cristianos, I need to scram, I need to chip out’. There’s nothing more that I could do. I saw him walk off maybe down the steps. I may shut the door and said if you need me…”

He also describes picking up Lucy and two of Jay’s other friends to go and look for him.

“They were just doing my head in, one said, ‘That’s the two bottles of Henny [Hennessy cognac], they were just doing my head in.

“In the end I just turned to Brandon and said, ‘Look Brandon, one of your mates, yesterday walked away because he’s f***** off with the ket [ketamine] and went missing. Tell this f****** idiot to get back in the car’.”

Williams-Thomas considers this last comment to be ‘really significant new information.’

He says: “So, Qassim says in the recording that Jay left the rental on the morning and took with him Qassim’s ketamine.

“If you wonder why we’ve not heard this before, his police statement of course made no mention of this. My intelligence, however, is that the rental location was specifically chosen so as not to bring attention to any illegal activity.”

As for Lucy Mae, she claims police in Tenerife ‘weren’t taking me seriously’ when she first reported Jay Slater missing.

She also reveals how Jay told her he was ‘going on a mission’ the night before he vanished – before sending a photo to another friend of himself carrying not one, but two knives.

“On the night before, when I was still awake, before we went home, he messaged me saying ‘I’m going on a mission’, then I’ve gone home, tried to find him…”

“Woke up to the call from Brandon in the morning, ‘oh my God he’s in the mountains, trying to walk… He’s said ‘can’t go back there, can’t go back there’ (to the Airbnb).”

On the clip Jay sent of himself armed with the knives, Lucy Mae says: ‘He took the kitchen knives from the Airbnb and put them down his pants, lifted his top up and shown it to him ‘Just in case anything kicks off’. I’m like…”

She adds: “It could have just been a coincidence but with him also saying about going on a mission…”

Qassim says the case turned him into ‘public enemy number one’, as everyone thought he had something to do with Jay’s disappearance.

He said: “Lucy (Law) has my Snapchat, so has Brad (Hargreaves), we have each other on social media. I can chat to the mum, I don’t need any of this. I’ve got journalists turning up at my house.

“I genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, let a guy come to my house, because he said to me ‘mate they’ve all left’ and chatting to them, they said he wanted to carry on partying.”

“I’m black, it’s an unfortunate situation. I’m being nice in letting someone stay at mine and now I’m public enemy number one.”

In all likelihood, it does seem that Jay Slater got lost in the middle of his trek in the early hours of the morning and ended up falling down a ditch, but I suppose investigators need to be sure that there was no foul play involved. Is there any significance to Jay Slater taking Qassim’s ketamine with him on the night he disappeared? Surely Qassim would keep that to himself, even a year later, if he had anything to hide.

Either way, might be a good idea for Lucy Mae and Qassim to turn up at the inquest next time, so we can get some answers and close this case once and for all.

Just recently, we also heard was bragging about a £12,000 Rolex that he ‘took off some c***’ hours before his death. Could that be the missing piece of the puzzle?